About Li Gong and This Blog
May 1st, 2007 by lgong
This blog is focused on the activities around and related to Mozilla and Firefox in China. It hopes to share observations, relay interesting findings, and also serve as a notice board as well as reporting pages for events we organize, participate, or promote.
Li Gong (宫力 in Chinese) is Chairman and CEO of Mozilla Online Ltd., the Beijing-based subsidiary of the Mountain View, California, headquartered Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Online’s mission is to promote the vision of the Mozilla Foundation and promote the adoption of the Firefox browser.
Born and raised in Beijing, Li obtained BS/MS at Tsinghua University and a PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. He started his career as a researcher, primarily in the fields of computer systems, networking, and information security. He served as both Program Chair and General Conference Chair for ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, and IEEE CSFW. He was Associate Editor of ACM TISSEC and Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing. He held visiting positions at Cornell and Stanford, and was a Guest Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
In 1996 he left SRI International (in Menlo Park, California) to join the newly formed JavaSoft division at Sun (in Cupertino, California) where he was Chief Java Security Architect (and responsible for the Java security architecture and product lines in use today across all three major Java platforms) and became a Distinguished Engineer and later a senior engineering director. He headed engineering for Java Embedded Server (the home networking platform) and JXTA (the P2P platform, see jxta.org) before returning to Beijing in 2001 to found Sun’s Engineering and Research Institute (ERI). He served as General Manager at ERI and grew it from scratch to over 400 engineers. He was instrumental in setting up the (now expired) Mozilla China Foundation and served as its founding co-president. He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a corporate General Manager to head up MSN in China, with operations in Beijing and Shanghai, and grew the team ten-folds to work in many areas across all the services MSN offers — including Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, Safety, Mobile, Search, Ads platform, and Virtual Earth. He joined Mozilla in 2007 to found Mozilla Online Ltd.
Li has 12 issued US patents, co-authored 3 books (published by Addison Wesley and O’Reilly) and many technical articles, and received the 1994 Leonard G. Abraham Award given by the IEEE Communications Society for “the most significant contribution to technical literature in the field of interest of the IEEE.” He was named one of the 2003 China New Economy People by China Internet Weekly and Sina.com, and received the China Open Source Movement Leadership Award in 2003 given by CCID and the China Software Industry Association. He was the founding Beijing chapter chair of TEEC (Tsinghua Entreprenuer and Executive Club) until 2007.